Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

Budgeting in Postconflict Countries 443
Aid management is too complex a subject to be recapitulated here. In
postconflict situations, however, a special and serious issue is the “sunset
dilemma.” An AMA is necessary in the immediate postconflict period
because the formal government structures do not yet exist or have extremely
limited capacity and also because donors require transparent and reasonably
corruption-free financial management. Over time, as the regular government
institutions grow, competition emerges between the governmental
structures and the parallel AMA. Instead of a smooth handover of responsibility,
the parallel tracks tend to persist, partly because the AMA has built
up greater implementation capacity and contacts with donors, and partly
because accountability and financial transparency remain a must for donors.
Thus, the AMA acquires a technocratic monopoly and stays active longer
than envisaged, competing with regular government ministries for resources
and authority and, in some cases, preventing their strengthening and
improvement.
The key lesson of this experience is that the government and donors
should agree from the outset on a clear sunset clause, by which the special
AMA will be absorbed into the regular structure of government at an appropriate
specific time. An exit strategy for the AMA is necessary. In turn, that
strategy should be linked to appropriate conditionality vis-à-vis the emerging
government structures. Finally, during the same period, concerted assistance
is required to build institutional capacity in the regular organs of
government—because proliferation of weak or corrupt government ministries
is not a sound alternative to a technocratic monopoly of decision
making by the AMA.
Assembling a Government Budget in Postconflict Situations
As noted earlier, simplicity and adaptation are the watchwords for
postconflict reconstruction and recovery. Nowhere is this truer than in
public expenditure management and financial accountability. The priorities
discussed in this section are as basic as the budgeting systems are
dilapidated.
Priority Number One: Protect the Money
In the circumstances typical of the immediate postconflict period, the first
budgeting “reform”priority is to try to ensure that public financial resources,
external or domestic, do not actually disappear. Protecting the public’s
money is the fundamental fiduciary duty of both the government and the